Wednesday, April 8

A couple of weeks ago.

I twittered briefly about this incident and since then, I have meant to give a fuller report here. I haven't been doing so well with updates lately. Perhaps I used up all my words when writing about the Milwaukee trip.

Two Wednesday mornings ago, I got up at around 7:00 and was in the kitchen making my tea. I kept hearing this annoying beeping sound, the sort of sound that a commercial vehicle sometimes makes when backing up. But it seemed louder than normal and went on and on forever. Very annoying. Finally I went to the front window and opened the blinds to see what I could see. And what I saw was a sand colored armored humvee parked at the end of our driveway. It looked something like this. And it completely freaked me out.

An armored humvee? At the bottom of our driveway? The hell? So I just stood there, watching. A few minutes later I see about 5 or 6 men come from down the street. They are wearing fatigues and flak jackets. I could hardly believe my eyes. In fact, I was so utterly shocked at what I was seeing, I went and got Will out of bed. I thought maybe I was seeing things. But no, they were out there. We both stood at the window, trying to figure out what was happening. The men were just sort of milling around and then four of them got into the back of the humvee, two in front. The driver was wearing a shirt that said FBI across the front. This was some serious business.

After a few more minutes, they pulled away. It was all so mysterious. I walked down to the end of the driveway, but the street was empty. Humvee was gone. I did notice a suspicious looking SUV parked down the street and wondered if it was more FBI folks, but I didn't see anyone. The whole thing was so bizarre.

A few days later, or maybe even the following week, we ran into our neighbor who asked us if we had heard the commotion that morning. She reported that there was two armored humvees in the neighborhood and another vehicle with FBI in it. And they were investigating the house on the side street a block over that is always bringing out the police. A woman used to live there who was always calling the cops on her boyfriend. Apparently she's in jail now, not sure what happened to the boyfriend, but the grandkids of the elderly owner are staying there now. Our neighbor talked to another neighbor who told her that two of the kids had been taken away.

This house has always been bad news according to our neighbor. The elderly woman who owns it passed it on to her kids who passed it on to their kids and so on. One of men who used to live there was a big time gang leader here in Santa Fe. He got shot and killed years ago. But I guess there have always been gang connections in the family. Other than the occasional cop showing up, we never hear anything from over there though.

But to have FBI and armored humvees and guys in fatigues and flak jackets over here. That's some serious stuff. Something big time must be going on over there. A meth lab? Our best speculation is that it has something to do with smuggling guns or someting of that sort. That would be cause to bring in the FBI. Our neighborhood does not feel unsafe to me. It's fairly quiet and I don't know, I guess we have a lot of homeless people wandering around because there is a shelter a few blocks away, but still, I never feel threatened. So it's really weird that there is potentially something really bad happening right near us.

And you know, it was until we were talking to my neighbor that I realized that it never even crossed my mind to get out my camera and take a photo of the armored humvee. I was so shocked by it being out there, that for once my brain didn't automatically think, "get your camera." Oh well.